A Reading of Frankenstein as the Complaint of a
Political Wife

Judith Weissman

Colby Library Quarterly, 12 (December 1976),
171-80

{171} Many twentieth century horror movies, as we all know, are
metaphorical warnings about some political danger, usually
communism. The makers of movies like The Green Slime and
It Conquered the World certainly know what they are doing
as they disguise the political idea as some kind of monster that
destroys men or takes over their minds, and apparently they feel
no guilt or ambivalence about their villains.
Frankenstein, the ancestor of all the stories of mad
scientists and their monstrous creations which have haunted us
since the beginning of the nineteenth century, can also be seen
as a disguised political warning. Mary Shelley, the daughter
of one radical man and the
wife of another, who
adored and was influenced by both,1 was certainly no cynical right-wing
propagandist; but her book nevertheless suggests a distinct,
though perhaps unconscious, unhappiness with the revolutionary
politics of her husband and his political predecessors.

Many critics have pointed out that Victor Frankenstein resembles
Percy Shelley, and Christopher Small has studied the
similarities exhaustively, even noticing such details as that
Victor was a youthful pseudonym of Shelley's and that Elizabeth
is the name of both Frankenstein's adopted sister and Shelley's
favorite sister;2 but no one has really discussed the
hostility, on Mary's part, which is implied in the resemblance.
Mary makes Frankenstein moody, wild, delicate, excessively
sensitive, and enthusiastic, as Shelley is supposed to have
been. Frankenstein even describes himself with one of Shelley's
favorite images for himself, the wounded fawn: "the
wounded deer dragging its fainting limbs to some untrodden brake
there to gaze upon the arrow which had pierced it, and to die --
was but a type of me."3

Even more significant and striking than the general similarities
in {172} temperament between Shelley and Frankenstein are their
similarities as scientists. Frankenstein tells Walton about his
childhood fascination with magic and the writings of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus: "under the
guidance of my new preceptors, I entered with the greatest
diligence into the search of the philosopher's stone and the
elixir of life; but the latter soon obtained my undivided
attention. Wealth was an inferior object; but what glory would
attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human
frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death"
(p. 40). He says that he was
also fascinated with the power of electricity and with necromancy: "the raising of
ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my
favourite authors, the fulfillment of which I most eagerly
sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I
attributed the failure rather to my own inexperience and
mistake, than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors"
(p. 40). Frankenstein's
descriptions of himself are practically a paraphrase of Thomas Jefferson Hogg's
descriptions of Shelley:

He [Shelley] was passionately attached to the study of what used
to be called the occult sciences, conjointly with that of the
new wonders, which chemistry and natural
philosophy have displayed to us. His pocket money was spent in
the purchase of books relative to these darling pursuits -- of
chemical apparatus and materials. The books consisted of
treatises on magic and witchcraft, as well as those more modern
ones detailing the miracles of electricity and galvanism. Sometimes he
watched the livelong night for ghosts. At his father's house,
where his influence was, of course, great among the dependants,
he even planned how he might get admission to the vault, or
charnel house, at Warnham Church, and might sit there all night,
harrowed by fear, yet trembling with expectation, to see one of
the spiritualised owners of the bones piled around him.
. . . No ghost appeared, but for the credit of
glamour-books, he did not doubt that the incantation failed from
some mistake of his own.4

After a period of disillusionment with science, Frankenstein, as
he tells Walton, regained his interest in it at the University of Ingolstadt, where he
discovered that being a modern scientist did not mean giving up
the grandiose dreams of the ancient occult philosophers.
Christopher Small suggests the political and philosophical
significance of the place where this change occurs in
Frankenstein when he observes that "Ingolstadt . . .
was the university where the revolutionary secret society of the
Illuminati, a romantic
conspiracy which exercised a strong fascination upon Shelley
especially, was formed in 1776."5 It was there, after two years of
ceaseless study and labor, that Frankenstein discovered the
secret of life which enabled him to create a living being, a
being which he hoped would be a blessing to the world. "Life and
death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break
through, and pour a {173} torrent of light into our dark world.
A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many
happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me" (p. 54). And Shelley, in his
years at Oxford, also
believed that science was connected with political liberation.
Hogg says that he dreamed of new forms of power and new ways of
exploration, and that he even speculated that if Africa were
explored, "the shadow of the first balloon, which a vertical sun
would project precisely underneath it, as it glided silently
over that hitherto unhappy country, would virtually emancipate
every slave, and would annihilate slavery forever."6 Just how this
emancipation would occur Shelley apparently neglected to explain
to his skeptical friend, who comments that "his speculations
were as wild as the experience of twenty-one years has shown
them to be."7
Hogg himself, though impressed by Shelley, studied, and urged
Shelley to study, the moral rather than the physical sciences,
and therefore may be Mary Shelley's model for Frankenstein's
adolescent friend Clerval, who "occupied himself, so to speak,
with the moral relations of things" (p. 38). No absolutely certain
inferences can be drawn, of course, from similarities between
fictional characters and characters whom an author knew; but the
similarities between Shelley and Frankenstein are striking
enough to suggest at least the possibility that Mary says things
about Shelley in her fiction which she never allows herself to
say about him openly.

The other biographical clue which must be connected with the
portrayal of Shelley as the mad scientist is the similarity
between events in the lives of
the Shelleys just before and during the period when Mary was
writing Frankenstein, and events in the book.8 The monster
expressed his hatred for his creator by murdering members of his
family: he strangled William, Frankenstein's youngest brother;
falsely implicated Justine, a servant who was practically a
member of the family, so that she was executed for the murder;
later strangled Clerval, and then Elizabeth, Frankenstein's
bride, and therefore precipitated the death of the
broken-hearted father. Seemingly gratuitous deaths in the family
also overwhelmed Shelley and Mary in 1815 and 1816. Mary's first
baby, a girl, died suddenly in 1815; in 1816 both Fanny Imlay, Mary's
half-sister, and Harriet
Shelley, Shelley's wife, committed suicide.

Adults can know intellectually that deaths are not their fault,
but no one ever entirely escapes from the child's fantasy that
someone must be to blame for all unhappiness. Mary obviously
would not have wanted to blame herself or Shelley for the
deaths9 --
or, in the case of Fanny, her {174} adored father;10 and so
perhaps to express both guilt and anger she created a monster
twice removed from her husband, but still related to him, on
whom she could project her wishes to blame someone. The death of
a child is a classic, even mythological cause for a wife's
irrational anger at her husband, and Mary Shelley may have
turned her husband into a madman in her story instead of killing
him, like Clytemnaestra, or withdrawing into cold hatred like
the wife in Frost's "Home Burial." And it is difficult for me to
imagine that Mary herself felt no guilt for Harriet's death,
though her letters and journals mention no such feelings, for
she did, after all, elope with Harriet's husband. The only woman
in Frankenstein with whom Mary might have identified is
Elizabeth, blameless, pure, loving, devoted to Frankenstein --
and murdered by the monster, his creation, on their wedding
night. In at least one place Mary did reveal that she felt
terribly hurt by the events that took place during her life with
Shelley, if not by Shelley himself. She said in her journal
entry on August 4, 1819, after her son William died (and two
years after she wrote Frankenstein), "I begin my Journal
on Shelley's birthday. We have now lived five years together;
and if all the events of the five years were blotted out, I
might be happy; but to have won, and then cruelly to have lost
the associations of four years, is not an accident to which the
human mind can bend without much suffering."11 Perhaps some
of that suffering produced Frankenstein and his monster.

Still, biographical and psychological conjectures suggest only a
possible motive behind the book. The next question, as in the
analysis of a dream, must be why these feelings took this
particular form. The subtitle of the book, The
Modern Prometheus, suggests that it is part of a literary
argument between the Shelleys over the meaning of the myth of Prometheus.12 Mary wrote
Frankenstein in 1816 and 1817, and Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound in
1818 and 1819, and the most
obvious inspiration for both works is the poem "Prometheus" of their friend Byron (1816), who did not invent
an ending for the story of Prome- {175} theus, but simply
characterized him as the eternal, though hopeless,
revolutionary, forever defying an unjust god for the sake of
suffering mankind.

Shelley and Mary developed the story of Prometheus in ways that
are superficially parallel but which give their stories
absolutely different meanings. In both books the Promethean
character gives power to someone who is supposed to aid the
human race and finds both himself and the human race tyrannized
by the supposed benefactor. Frankenstein imagines that his
super-human creature will be the father of a beneficent race
that will improve life on earth; Prometheus gives power to
Jupiter so that Jupiter can overthrow Saturn, under whose rule
man was not free intellectually. The monster, rejected by
Frankenstein as soon as it comes to life, haunts Frankenstein
and kills his family; Jupiter, as soon as he gains power, chains
Prometheus to an icy mountain and torments the human race. Both
Frankenstein and Prometheus become entrapped in their own
feelings of vengeance and hatred toward the tyrants whom they
create and utter rather similar vows of eternal revenge.
Frankenstein swears by the earth, the shades, his own grief,
night, and the spirits of night, to pursue the monster to the
death, and calls on the spirits of the dead and of vengeance to
help him: "let the cursed and hellish monster drink deep of
agony; let him feel the despair that now torments me" (p. 202). Prometheus calls on
the earth to repeat to him his curse, but the earth tells him
that he must hear it from the Phantasm of Jupiter, called up
from the realm of Demogorgon, which is both the world of ghosts
and metaphorically, the subconscious. In the first two stanzas
of the curse Prometheus calls on Jupiter to torture him as much
as he can, for he will remain defiant; and in the second two, he
calls exactly similar tortures down on Jupiter.

I curse thee! Let a
sufferer's curse
Clasp thee, his torturer,
like remorse!
Till thine Infinity shall
be
A robe of envenomed
agony;
And thine Omnipotence a crown of pain,
To cling like burning gold round thy dissolving brain.13

Shelley, by making the source of Prometheus' words the hated
object as it exists in his own subconscious, and by making the
curse reflexive -- Prometheus and Jupiter are doing identical things to each other
-- indicates that the true tyranny from which Prometheus must
free himself is not another being, but a structure of his own
mind.

Shelley's Prometheus, who is also the spirit of Greece, the
embittered spirit of the French Revolution, and the collective
rational mind of the human race, can redeem himself, and by
extension, the human race, {176} through repentance and through
love. He repents of his wish to hurt Jupiter after he hears the
curse; he goes through a period of despair after the furies
remind him of the harm that has come from the two great attempts
to benefit the human race since the time of ancient Greece --
the coming of Christ and the French Revolution. But after the
chorus of spirits reminds him that the impulses of benevolence
and love cannot be eradicated by the unfortunate outcome of a
particular action, he once again becomes ready to love and to
seek his wife, Asia, who is simultaneously a culture necessary
to complete Greek culture, the female spirit, and the human
heart and imagination. After Asia has undergone her own
purgation by traveling to the realm of Demogorgon, and the two
elements of the human spirit are reunited, tyranny is banished.
Oppressive political structures can be eradicated by changes
within human beings in Shelley's poem, as they can in the
writings of William Godwin.

The Promethean spirit of Victor Frankenstein is allowed no such
salvation. Both he and the monster do repent, at the last
possible minute, and wish for each other's forgiveness, but Mary
does not build up to or explain their respective changes of
heart. Nor does she allow Victor to gain anything through
Elizabeth, his saintly sister and wife of one day, who has the
same symbolic role as Asia -- "she was the living spirit of love
to soften and attract" (p.
38). When Victor is absorbed in his deadly scientific
venture, he is cut off, as Prometheus is in the first act of
Prometheus Unbound, from both nature and love: "my eyes
were insensible to the charms of nature, and the same feelings
which made me neglect the scenes around me caused me also to
forget those friends who were so many miles absent, and whom I
had not seen for so long a time" (p. 55). But the crucial
difference is that Shelley's Prometheus is isolated, unable to
love, after he is embittered by Jupiter's betrayal of
him; Frankenstein is unable to love while he is still creating
the monster, who returns to kill his bride on their wedding
night. It is too late for Frankenstein to seek salvation through
love; apparently the very quest for scientific knowledge and the
very attempt to give some radically new help to the human race
irreparably damage his capability for human relationships.

In Prometheus Unbound Jupiter has no real character; but
in Frankenstein the monster is the most interesting
character, and the one who most clarifies the meaning of
Frankenstein's irremediable mistake.14 The {177} original character and
subsequent development of the monster come straight from Rousseau's first great
revolutionary essay, the Discourse on the Origins and
Foundations of Inequality.15 The monster, before he begins his
story, compares himself to both Adam and Satan, the characters of
Christian myth whom Rousseau explains in a new way in his
discourse -- the true original man, and the true cause of his
fall. The monster's first memories are of confused sense
impressions, then of the discovery of sources of food and water,
and of distinguishing night and day and different plants and
animals -- the activities of Rousseau's natural man. He then
discovers fire, and after shocking a few people by his
appearance he settles down in a hut next to the home of a
family. At first he has only the two instincts which Rousseau
says are basic to both human beings and animals, self
preservation and pity. As soon as he realizes that he has been
causing the family to suffer by stealing their food, he stops,
and even assists them by gathering wood for them. He goes beyond
these two instincts by watching the family, from whom he learns
familial affection, which
Rousseau believes is the first social feeling. He also,
conveniently, learns speech from them (the origin of which
Rousseau finds it impossible to determine).

He begins to understand a social structure beyond that of the
family when Felix teaches his Arabian woman friend Safie from Volney's Ruins of Empires, and
comments on what he has learned of human history from the point
of view of Rousseau's original man: "for a long time I could not
conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or
even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard
details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased, and I turned
away with disgust and loathing" (p. 119). Having learned to read,
again through Felix's lessons, he discovers true social virtues
in Plutarch: "I felt the
greatest ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for
vice, as far as I understood the significance of these terms,
relative as they were, as I applied them, to pleasure and pain
alone. I was of course led to admire peaceable law-givers, Numa,
Solon, and Lycurgus, in preference to Romulus and Theseus" (p. 129). These are the
law-givers who initiate the few periods of history during which
Rousseau says, in The Social Contract, people were truly
virtuous, for natural man is neither good nor bad, and people in
societies which have advanced beyond the stage of the original
true social contract are corrupt.

If the monster is Rousseau's natural man, then Frankenstein
himself is at least partly Rousseau, the first romantic
revolutionary, the spiritual ancestor of Godwin and Shelley.
Though the most obvious reason that {178} much of
Frankenstein is set in Geneva is that Mary was there when
she conceived the story, Geneva is also the birthplace of Rousseau,
and therefore, in a way, of the French Revolution, as Mary
herself notes in a
letter of June 1, 1816, in which she describes part of the
city: "Here a small obelisk is erected to the glory of Rousseau,
and here (such is the mutability of human life) the magistrates,
the successors of those who exiled him from his native country,
were shot by the populace during that revolution which his
writings mainly contributed to mature, and which,
notwithstanding the temporary bloodshed and injustice with which
it was polluted, has produced enduring benefits to mankind,
which not all the chicanery of statesmen, nor even the greatest
conspiracy of kings, can entirely render vain."16

The view of the French
Revolution implied in Frankenstein, however, is not
so favorable. Having developed the monster's moral sense as
Rousseau says that the moral sense of the human race developed,
Mary abruptly puts him into conflict with the corrupt men of the
present or recent past. He ceases to follow his instinctive
sympathy for other creatures when his carefully planned approach
to the blind father of the family, who cannot see his ugliness,
is interrupted by Felix, who beats him. The terrified family
then abandons their home; "my protectors had departed, and had
broken the only link that held me to the world. For the first
time the feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom, and I
did not strive to control them; but, allowing myself to be borne
away by the stream, I bent my mind towards injury and death" (p. 138). Rousseau does not
describe any such sudden transformation of the natural man into
a vicious monster, but believes that human viciousness grew
slowly as the division of labor caused the stratification of
societies. So at this point in Frankenstein the monster
seems to stop being the natural man himself and to become the
idea of the natural man, an idea with utopian
implications, which first became destructive during the French
Revolution. The fact that the de Lacey family is French, not
Swiss, and that the first
language which the monster learns is French, has no bearing
whatsoever on the story; but it may be an indication that the
destruction which follows the natural man's attempt to introduce
himself to the human race is emblematic of events that took
place in France.

After killing members of Frankenstein's family in Switzerland,
where, as Mary mentions in her letter of June 1, 1816, there was
also revolutionary violence, the monster follows Frankenstein to
England, where Frankenstein begins to work on the mate which the
monster demands in exchange for future peace. He reconsiders,
and destroys the mate, upon realizing the monster's true evil;
this abortive episode may reflect the fears of many English
people, including William Godwin, that they would be overwhelmed
by a violent revolution like the one in France.

{179} The most troublesome problem in trying to make a coherent
political interpretation of Frankenstein is finding a
metaphorical meaning for the monster's ugliness. If he had
looked like a normal human being, presumably he would not have
been rejected and would have remained virtuous. The monster's
ugliness, if it stands for anything, must stand for whatever
keeps people from looking beyond the threatening appearance of
something new and seeing its true goodness. It is wrong,
certainly, for people to reject the monster at first, and yet
they apparently cannot help their instinctive reaction of
horror.17
This reaction suggests the old right-wing line that the human
race is not "ready" (and probably never will be) for radical
change, no matter how noble that change might be. As one Chicago
political boss put it, "Chicago ain't ready for reform."
Frankenstein implies that although Rousseau's new and
radical idea about human nature may be right, the human race
cannot accept it.

The psychological and political meanings of Frankenstein merge
in Mary's idea of how the monster -- or Rousseau's image of man
-- or the French Revolution -- was produced. It is the product
of male science and reason rather than of the love of two
parents in a family. Mary herself was a motherless child, her mother having died
virtually in childbirth, and she puts great emotional power into
the voice of the monster, an image of isolation. He complains
bitterly that he is alone, without a family, and claims that he
could have been good if he were not alone -- and indeed, could
still be, with a mate. The family is the ultimate value in
Frankenstein. The families of Frankenstein's mother,
Elizabeth, Justine, de Lacey, and Saphie are all damaged by
trauma -- economic, legal, political; but Frankenstein's family
and the de Lacey family offer the only source of protection and
warmth in a dangerous world. It is appropriate that the monster
destroys Frankenstein's family, for he is the incarnation of the
violation of family ties -- a child without a mother, produced
by science rather than love.

Other Romantics, like Shelley and Wordsworth, share Mary's
belief that the French Revolution went wrong because it was too
masculine, too intellectual, and cut people off from the past
and from their own feelings. But Mary, instead of trying to
create a spiritually improved version of the revolution, as
Shelley does in Prometheus Unbound and Wordsworth does in
the Prelude, rejects it entirely in Frankenstein.
She has no illusions about the state of human justice, as she shows in
the trials of Justine and de Lacey, and yet the monster, with
all his good intentions, is able to alleviate no injustice
whatsoever. The book as a whole supports the little sermon which
Frankenstein preaches to Walton, another scientist who dreams of
helping the human race:

{180} A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a
calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a
transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think
that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If
the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken
your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple
pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is
certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human
mind. If this rule were always observed, if no man allowed any
pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his
domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would
have spared his country; America would have been discovered more
gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been
destroyed. (pp. 55-56)

The causal connection between betrayal of domestic affections
and this odd assortment of political disasters is both
mysterious and novel. It is no doubt true that if every soldier
who fought in the Peloponnesian War, Julius Caesar, Columbus,
and Cortez had all stayed at home, and no one had taken their
places, world history would have been different. But this is a
peculiar theory of history, to say the least.

The irrationality of this passage reveals Mary Shelley's
obsessive association of disruption of the family and political
activity. The speech might be translated, in a crude and vulgar
way, into a message to Shelley something like, "It is people
like you and Rousseau who think they are going to do so much
good and neglect their families for their big plans, who really
mess things up politically." The implication of Frankenstein's
speech is not just that men sacrifice their families for the
sake of larger goals, but that by neglecting their families men
actually cause political disasters. At the end of the book,
Walton, another isolated and utopian scientist, follows the
advice of the repentant Frankenstein, gives up his quest for
knowledge, and returns home to his sister. Mary does not simply
suggest that masculine wisdom must be joined with feminine love;
she makes the pursuit of knowledge and faithfulness to the
family mutually exclusive activities. And there is hell to pay,
in Frankenstein, for the man who does not put his family
first. His thoughts, scientific and political, become a monster
which destroys his family and himself.

Notes

1. Among the critics and biographers who have
discussed the positive political influences of Godwin and
Shelley on Mary's thought are Eileen Bigland, in Mary
Shelley (London, 1959); Wilfred Cude, in "Mary Shelley's
Modern Prometheus, A Study in the Ethics of Scientific
Creativity" (Dalhousie Review, LII, 212-255); Noel B,
Gerson, in Daughter of Earth and Water, A Biography of Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley (New York, 1973); Christopher Small,
in Ariel Like a Harpy, Shelley, Mary, and Frankenstein
(London, 1972); and William Walling, in Mary Shelley (New
York, 1972).

8. Small discusses the similarity of events in
the life of Shelley and Mary and in Frankenstein (pp.
206-7).

9. Small writes in great detail about Shelley's
image of himself as blameless and his refusal to accept any
guilt for deaths in the family (pp. 171-195). Mary's conscious
idealization of Shelley clearly follows his idealization of
himself; but Small does not pursue the idea that she may have
been subconsciously blaming him.

10. Bigland reprints and discusses the
astonishingly cold letter that Godwin wrote to Shelley and Mary,
asking them to help him hush up Fanny's suicide, and Mary's
inordinately grateful response to this first letter from her
father since her elopement (p. 97). Mary's repression and
transformation of anger toward her radical father surely fed
into her feelings toward her husband, but to pursue the subject
would be the business of another essay.

12. Among the critics who discuss the
connections among the Promethean figures of Byron, Shelley, and
Mary Shelley are Walling (pp. 44-5); P. D.
Fleck, in "Mary Shelley's Notes to Shelley's Poems and
Frankenstein" (Studies in Romanticism, VI 226-54);
Harold Bloom, in "Frankenstein, or The New Prometheus"
(Partisan Review, XXXII (1965) 611-618); and Christopher
Small. Walling sees Mary's novel as "a transitional point
between the Byronic view of Prometheus (as evidenced in his
short poem) and the Shelleyan transformation of the Titan in
Prometheus Unbound," evading, I think the truly negative
meaning of Mary's Prometheus, as Bloom and Fleck also do. Small
devotes an entire chapter to the connections between
Frankenstein and Prometheus Unbound, but he reads
Shelley superficially and with little reference to politics,
which is my focus.

14. The monster can, of course, be interpreted
in other than political terms. L. J.
Swingle sees it as a Romantic Stranger which challenges the
mind's categories of thought ("Frankenstein's Monster and Its
Romantic Relatives: Problems of Knowledge in English
Romanticism," Texas Studies in Literature and Language,
XV, 51-66). Harold Bloom thinks that it epitomizes the despair
caused by Romantic self-consciousness; Wilfred Cude sees it as
the power of science divorced from human responsibility.
Christopher Small interprets it in vaguely Jungian terms,
calling it "the projection of Frankenstein's (and Shelley's own)
shadow" (p. 293), a being who represents something repressed
which the whole human race must finally acknowledge as its
own.

15.Burton R. Pollin,
in "Philosophical and Literary Sources of Frankenstein"
(Comparative Literature, XVII, 97-108), and Mary Graham
Lund, in "Mary Godwin Shelley and the Monster" (University of
Kansas Review, XXVII, 253-8), have mentioned that the ideas
of Rousseau are a source for Mary's picture of the development
of the monster but have not suggested that the monster is an
emblem of the revolution that developed out of Rousseau's
ideas.